L2 pragmatic development through conversational interaction: Heritage language background and explicitness of feedback

This dissertation investigates whether and how learners' heritage language (HL) background and explicitness of feedback influence second language (L2) pragmatic development of Korean referent honorifics through conversational interaction. Specifically, this study focuses on HL learners versus non-heritage language (NHL) learners and recasts versus metalinguistic correction. Although abundant empirical research has demonstrated that the provision of interactional feedback to learners' error facilitates their morphosyntactic and lexical development, the role of interactional feedback in learning L2 pragmatics has been hardly explored. In addition, while recent years have seen a fast growing interest in the study of HL learners in second language acquisition, and the differential effects of implicit and explicit feedback have been a prolific area of research, little is known whether these different populations of learners react to these two types of feedback differently.;Thus, the study seeks answers to the following research questions: (a) does interactional feedback promote L2 pragmatic development?; (b) how does learners' HL background affect L2 pragmatic development?; (c) how does explicitness of feedback affect L2 pragmatic development?; and (d) how does explicitness of feedback affect L2 pragmatic development of learners with different HL background? A total of 78 intermediate-level English-speaking learners of Korean as a foreign language at two public universities in the United States participated. The learners were randomly assigned to the following four experimental groups and a control group: (a) HL/Implicit group (n=16); (b) HL/Explicit group (n=15); (c) NHL/Implicit group ( n=16); (d) NHL/Explicit group (n=16); and (e) control group (n=15). The linguistic target was Korean referent honorifics in the area of pragmatics. Since pragmatics is highly context-sensitive, the photos of the researcher's own family and acquaintances in Korea were used to provide as natural and authentic contexts as possible. The photos of individuals of differing age and social status were used to elicit Korean honorifics. In this study, the researcher, who served as a Korean native speaker (NS) interlocutor, and the learners partook in two types of tasks: (a) one-way photo description task and (b) two-way story sequencing task. This study employed a traditional pretest and posttest design to measure treatment effects. In the first session, all the learners completed a background questionnaire, followed by the pretest and the first treatment. In the second session, after the second treatment was conducted, the immediate posttest followed. During the treatment sessions, the NS researcher provided the learner with implicit or explicit feedback on erroneous utterances in Korean. Two weeks after the immediate posttest, the delayed posttest was administered.;The results showed that: (a) all the experimental groups showed a significant increase from the pretest to the posttests, contrary to the control group; (b) the NHL learners significantly outperformed the HL learners; (c) explicit feedback was significantly more effective than implicit feedback; and (d) explicit feedback was significantly more effective than implicit feedback for the HL learners, whereas no significant difference was found in the effects of two feedback types for the NHL learners. Also, the NHL/Explicit group showed the strongest development, whereas the HL/Implicit group demonstrated the weakest among the experimental groups. There was no significant difference between the HL/Explicit and the NHL/Implicit groups. The findings are discussed in terms of relative efficacy of implicit and explicit feedback in relation to different nature and learning process between the HL and the NHL learners.